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Ok, so I ditched Alamy!

Is it a bold or bad decision? – I closed my Alamy stock library account after not making a sale since Feb 09 and, to be honest, I feel better!

I first joined Alamy in 2005 when there was around 6 or 7 million pictures on their website. My humble collection, which eventually totalled about 1,000 images, gave me a steady, if not earth shattering, income as I made regular rights managed sales of mainly travel and tourism pictures.

However, in the last two years sales began to dry up. I also began to lose interest in eternally sitting at my pc editing pictures, resizing them, uploading them and then having to keyword them once accepted (inconsistent QC rejections aside!). Also I saw great quality pictures of the same subjects as mine being sold for $1 royalty free on various stock library websites and the sheer volume of images on Alamy (now heading for 19 million) meant that my image of a famous landmark was competing with several thousand others (I refuse to give my work away for $1).

The crunch came when I came back from China and uploaded what I thought was a unique and striking image of the caves at Guillin as seen below. It was one of my favourite images from the trip and I thought would be a good seller. However I did a quick search on Alamy and almost had a shock for there were several images, a couple almost exactly the same as mine (for a moment I thought somehow mine was already on sale!) and I thought this is no longer a good use of my time.

So what does this mean. Well, there are hundreds of stock suitable images from holidays sitting on my hard drive that will now not be edited, checked, upsized and keyworded. But they had been sitting there untouched for a long time, and all they were doing was nagging at me as a job that needed to be done for which I did not have the time. Now I don’t need to edit them I feel freer! I can also use my spare time now to do something I don’t do enough of – getting out there and enjoying taking pictures!